personally I think you should choose you're feature branch (i.e 17.05.x, 17.11.x or 18.05.x) based on the features you need/want and then try to keep up with the bugfix releases upon it.. i.e the .01 etc bits.

important securit andbugfix patches go into those releases.. but as release maintainers we're careful to not backport features.. we work on 'least surprise' principals.. a point release shouldn't surprise you

I think at this point it's just that we have never managed to get on top of upgrades.. sales always want to install at the very latest and greatest.. some customers want to upgrade, others do not.. but the really big issue is how hard our upgrades are.. most customers have a ton of customisation or pre-release enhancements bolted on.. which makes each upgrade a non-trivial task :(

just looked at the number of upgrade in the queue and scared himself.. that's not my area anymore.. I managed to make the case for new staff for it a few years back and have never really looked back.. managing the dev team, doing development and getting back on top of my community roles is more than enough work for one person ;)